I'm not sure a lot of people have experienced this, to be honest. I don't invest in many alts at all. A handful of ICOs last year, and a a string of alts I bought. In general, even for the few that I've lost a lot of value in, they haven't dropped to zero (Elastic is my brilliant example, I bought in at 20+k satoshi!) and I still have very strong hopes for them.

Come back in a couple of years though and you might see a few that have died. Not necessarily zero, but super thin volumes that nobody ever buys anymore.

That's almost the same as Ethereum, to be honest, with the exception that even if you circumvent using Eth to transfer tokens, you still need to pay miners gas (or spend ether) to spend all those ERC20 tokens. Yes, it creates a small micro economy where Ether is being used, but as all of this goes to miners, you might argue that the same net effect can be observed. But hey, it still increases Eth's value. They have to develop and improve the platform. And if XRP does the same, the token itself will experience the same slower rise.

It has happened, not as rarely as you seem to suggest, but if an alt is reputable and at least useful beyond the normal "low fee, fast transaction" argument, they will always have their own individual price growths, that don't depend on how Bitcoin is performing. BUT, once that growth (or decline) has happened, then its "stable" price will always move around the same pattern as Bitcoin's. This is only natural, just look at any chart when there isn't anything special going on with alts. They mirror BTC.

You're right. Lighting will kick in and everyone will forget they ever doubted.

Second time I've seen this 100-day range being used, so you're also thinking of the 200-day range to be broken next? (100 day has historically already been broken, but never the 200-day yet).

I don't know your charts, alts seem falling at the same rate as BTC in my books. Just as they have since December. I'll add your warning to my growing list of warnings.

Yes, if you're dealing with a well-known conventional asset/commodity. No for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has had all these exact same percentages and trends for years, without any of those points ever becoming important in its history. Think about it. All your points actually happened DURING the Bitcoin boom from 1k to 20k. All of that happened last year, not this year.

1. Scaling, big issue since 2016.
2. Government crackdown. At least since 2013.
3. Big banks putting Bitcoin down. Wow. Since 2011.
4. Tether. Again, old news, big since 2016 and last year.

Exactly! Whether or not it touches any specific figure beyond the range it already HAS, Bitcoin will continue to be volatile and unpredictable - for many years. How can it stabilize when newcomers with their new money are still entering, and will do so for many years? I don't mind it reaching 9k, or even 5k, because I believe all this movement is just part of its trend, but I believe in a price in 2020 and beyond. Will that be 10k or 20k, I can't say. I have hopes, but I can only wait for the reality to arrive.

If you're going to make a long term investment on this or any other coin, for that matter, you'd probably be better off making decisions on your own. Most responses you'd get here are self motivated, including mine I admit.

One thing to note: if any alt sets off with the mission to "dethrone" Bitcoin, they should work first on adoption and utility. Not price, not tech, not even fast confirmations or zero fees. Almost all alts are supposedly superior to Bitcoin's tech, but that's not the only thing or even the main thing that will make people switch.

So far, no alt can match the Bitcoin community's support. Got a problem with tx? Ask and knowledgeable people help. Developers at BTC are also the very best. You get a secure, tested, solid and mature coin with Bitcoin. Got a problem with an alt tx? wallet? Try see how many people help, and how many give useful advice.

Not really. I did experiment with a LOT of staking coins using a service called PosWallet. I had maybe 50 different coins staking all together (you give them your coins to stake and they keep a percentage of it), I couldn't possibly open 50 different wallets to stake. Either my computer would crash or each wallet would take too much time to maintain and sync.

Bitcoin is a proof-of-work (PoW) coin so you need hardware to mine (secure the network). Just look up PoS coins, these are the ones you could stake. Again, not necessarily earn money. Staking just generates more coins. If those coins keep decreasing in value, then you don't make any money!

As much as I agree with your closing points, your comparison to stocks of companies can't be used here. Ethereum isn't a company, it's a platform for enterprises - and already has made a lot of cases for real use applications. $1 is of course plausible in crypto, but to have it happen this year when Ethereum 2.0 is not complete is utter nonsense. Post from your real account, okay?

Oh and this is from someone who actually doesn't believe in ETH (me).

Careful when you ask questions like these. You're going to get a lot of crap suggestions, so check out coins with PoS (proof-of-stake) algorithms on your own before making any decisions.

By the way you don't precisely make money from staking. Staking is just a different form of securing the network (or mining if you will) - so you generate more coins from staking your own, without needing expensive hardware to do so. So you make more coins, not necessarily more money. PoS has their own problems, but for now works because it lets everyone do it.

Atomic swapping would certainly drive a lot of adoption, but I've a feeling that this will first be achieved by Bitcoin itself (yep, surprise, surprise, Segwit, LN and then atomic swaps) so anything else that "attempts" it will have initial success but won't catch up with Bitcoin users' momentum. Python seems to be a surprise language to build from too, but they might have an idea there with already hundreds of thousands of Python-capable developers ready to plug into such a platform.

Good to see someone say this. If anyone treats Waves like a pump and dump, then they are in for disappointment. Waves has climbed steadily, always seeming to fall below 100k sats but holding well in US dollar terms. Don't know what people want, vaporware with developments only being exchange listing, coin burning and all that? Or something like Waves which is a serious platform with actual technological advancements? If you want good projects, then patience is key.

Finally decided to click on a thread that said Cindicator, and then when someone said Palm Beach Group I just lost all my appetite, haha. I can't believe I still remember the name Teeka Tiwari (or however it's spelled). But then PBG keeps spamming me so I guess their tactic works.

All the same, the chart made me sit up cause had no idea Gnosis had grown so much. Working product, does that mean there is a place to show performance by all traders using it? Can someone point me a link?

I see some talk now about a different kind of speculating, buying tokens like this to get bargains when they're being dumped after people collect dividends, and then selling them just before the next dividend round. Apparently as more tokens like this come out, it seems to be making a lot of money for speculators. Seems too much trouble for me, though, but I suppose if you had a lot of money you could turn out pretty solid profits. Or you could just end up getting trapped if you're not experienced.

This is also what I recommend. Basically, anyone can get a Google account. Do this. Then store all your crypto passwords ad everything via book marks. I use Chrome to store Meta Mask, to store Waves, even to store everything. If I lose my computer, I just open chrome, login to my google account and everything is restored. Of course, if people steal Google's database I am screwed. but then that's why I also encrypt all my wallets. But yes, to reiterate. Waves wallet on chrome extension. So light, so fast. That's why I love Waves.

You can see from the first few answers here that even if you wrote an article about why people use crypto, you'd probably be writing a different one every time you asked. You can't blame mainstream media for writing what they do. They're exposed to different networks of people, just like you will be here.

Let's see: one user says crypto's only used for speculating/trading, and not for means of payment because state doesn't allow it. Bitcoin was designed to free us from the state! So you might see that this could be the general population: crypto as a trading asset, never for its intended purpose, since most don't even take the effort or interest to learn about crypto.

Hello! I'm trying out this bot (I actually hate Telegram) and it so far looks pretty good. But I'm always still double checking with the actual site. Note that the fastest seems to be quite far from the not-so-fast, so it would be nice if you could also ask the bot something like "12 hours" or even "24 hours" since I'm seldom needing an urgent transfer, and fee saving adds up over the long term.

Also, it's quite fast in my using it, so don't know who is having problems, could be their connection.

All I can find online is news of Coincheck suspending trading since today, but no real explanation. The speculation seems to be hackings, but we should wait for the announcement tomorrow.

Ripple and NEM were the biggest losers, but it doesn't make sense a hack would cause them to drop. Shouldn't they basically go higher (in the end) if hacked crypto is taken out of circulation? I'm guessing it would be easy to track and blacklist them.

NEM I can sort of get since it has a lot of Japan backing, but surely the investors there know this is a hack on an exchange and nothing to do with bad security in crypto itself?

It took me more than six months on my last rash buying in, and even then I thought that was quite quick, was prepared to wait even a year actually. You've got to ask yourself: if two weeks are too long for you... if you're waiting to see "for once" your green profits, then you've made a terrible mistake by entering crypto trading, or trading. Did you set stop losses? If no, why? Do you have a target at all for profit and losses? If no, why? Did you have a target time? If you couldn't answer any of these questions, get back to the drawing board.

Hope you didn't step out completely, because you'll be lucky to trigger any buy orders on 9k, much less 8k. Unless you're willing to wait a few months. But that's just my speculation, no more scientific than yours;)

Tether is the only way to do this, I guess, and I still haven't overcome initial misgivings about Tether to start storing anything in that "crypto". I'm wondering why BTC hasn't swung either way yet, I'm sure US markets are just arriving on the new day now.